Hyperreality can be understood as a form of insulation. In Baudrillard’s terms, hyperreality isn’t just an escape from reality, but a replacement of it with a seamless web of simulations so dense and seductive that the question of reality becomes irrelevant or even disgraceful. From this lens, hyperreality is not only a result of insulating oneself from certain aspects of the real (especially violence, complicity, decay, death), but also a mechanism that continuously reinforces that insulation.

It’s not just that individuals hide from the knowledge of harm—they inhabit an entire world constructed to preclude that knowledge. And not through ignorance, but through substitution. Harm is aestheticized, depoliticized, flattened into infotainment or symbolic gestures. You don't confront the real consequences of supply chains or climate violence; you scroll past stylized footage. Hyperreal moral gestures are not "against" harm—they are the medium through which the reality of harm is disappeared.

So yes, hyperreality is insulation, but not in the sense of passive avoidance. It is an active system of mediation that simulates moral action, presence, and awareness, while ensuring those simulations never threaten the structure itself. In that sense, it is a mode of guilt laundering.

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